I’ll be sharing with you topics from the Anglo-Saxon and Mediaeval periods, as well as from Normandy and Moorish Spain that I researched for The Book and the Knife novel series, or have come across on my travels/reading, plus work or discoveries I’ve heard about, or anything else that I hope you’ll find interesting.
31 Jan 2026
This blog is based on a talk I gave to Mersham Historical Society. I approach Anglo-Saxon England through the ‘three orders of the world’ – those who work, those who pray, and those who fight.
It’s a notion that would have been readily understood at the time, and though Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham wasn...
14 Oct 2025
An overcast day on an October weekend… a hillside in Sussex… mighty forces drawn up against each other… the English at the top of the hill behind their shield wall… the Normans at the bottom of the hill with their archers and knights… it has to be the Battle of Hastings.
This year’s reenactment took...
21 Aug 2025
New BBC epic coming soon
The image heading this blog (Source: Lilja Jons) is from a trailer for a new historical epic King and Conqueror starting on the BBC on 24th August. It features the competing claims of Harold Godwinson and William of Normandy for England’s crown, that led up to the Battle of ...
23 Apr 2025
Canterbury has a fascinating history. Before the Anglo-Saxon period that I write about in The Book and the Knife it was an important Roman town, and in that period became the seat of the church in England with its archbishop the head of the church.
Westgate – an echo of Canterbury’s Roman past
The c...
16 Feb 2025
In my blog on the Silk Roads exhibition, I said that the book in The Book and the Knife series stands for the knowledge of the Islamic scholars such as Alhacen, who made huge advances in science in the East, Africa and Spain, during what we often refer to as the ‘dark ages’ in [northern] Europe. Alh...
